When the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870, it did not own a single work of art—just like your writer. Yes, the walls were a paltry display of Dave Matthews Band posters and a crew team rowing under the word “COURAGE,” all meekly fastened to the wall with that dastardly college-dorm-regimented sticky tack. Now, as you may have heard, it’s one of the world’s largest art museums, and its collection is only getting larger. To highlight its acquisitions, the Met launched “MetCollects” this week, a digital video series in which artists and the museum’s curators discuss the process behind the acquisition of a particular work, expounding on how a portrait or a medieval manuscript has bolstered the collection or filled in a particular historical gap. In the first episode, South African artist William Kentridge speaks on his esoteric installation, The Refusal of Time, deciphering work that might bewilder the casual visitor with a mystic-like rumination on “the journey to the black hole at the end.” Very Rust Cohle. A new episode will be posted weekly online.

Costumes have always played a lead role in Downton Abbey’s cast: think of Lady Sybil’s harem pants, Lady Mary’s frosty wedding dress, or Lady Edith’s Season-4 transformation from spinster to Poiret muse. Winterthur, one of the country’s most significant collections of American antiques, brings together 40 of the show’s costumes for the first time. As the former country estate of Henry Francis du Pont, the museum provides an evocative echo of English country living.

At a moment when fashion designers sell collection-inspiration stories like snake oil—“I was influenced by the moment when the desert meets the mirage” —the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has organized a Dries Van Noten exhibition that presents objects that have shaped his aesthetic, from Schiaparelli and Dior garments to Renaissance curiosity cabinets, alongside highlights from his vast archive. The result is a show that deciphers more about the cerebral Antwerp Six designer than any mere retrospective could hope to do.

While the rest of the world has been pursuing the fountain of youth, writing the next Lolita, and crowning teenagers C.E.O.s, England has said out with the old and in with the older. A new exhibition at the Tate Britain celebrates that distinctly British taste for decayed buildings, and includes painters J.M.W. Turner and John Constable’s romanticized landscapes of ruins and follies, as well as more sobering modern and contemporary explorations of the obsession with decay and dilapidation.

Never has a gallery show been more aptly named than this. At “The Weird Show,” three artists team up to toy with the structures of consciousness, the perception of time and space, and the central structure of an experience and its intentionality. The vessels charged with communicating these heady concepts include Le Maitre’s repository of snapshots, Snow’s wall of consumer objects, and Coffin’s large wooden hand. The gallery also sent out a call for twins to come dressed alike and wander between rooms, taking care to ensure they’re never in the same space. We recommend toting along your twin (or your Dostoyevskian best) and twin-bombing the affair.

Contrary to popular belief*, the 80s were not one long game of Mall Madness, with a Valley Girl-voiced narrator damning you to the fashion boutique to swipe a hot-pink credit card over and over like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill. This is also the decade that saw a boom in short-story writing, from dirty realists like Raymond Carver to brat packers like Tama Janowitz. On Wednesday, New York notables, including Ellen Barkin and Bobby Cannavale, will read short stories from those authors as well as other bests from the go-go decade.

Experiment with the concept of a far-flung staycation with Asia Week, New York’s weeklong celebration of Asian art. More than 60 galleries and museums are mounting exhibitions of gold-clouded screen paintings and massive bronze bodhisattva figures, and it will bring its usual mass of chain-smoking collectors to stand nervously outside Sotheby’s and Christie’s between auctions. Of particular note is a lot at Christie’s: the famous ‘Min’ Fanglei, a gargantuan wine vessel covered with “mysterious monster masks” from 12th/11th-century B.C. that set the world record for any Asian work of art when it was last auctioned in 2001—perfect for the sinophile-cum-oenophile in your life.